On fantasy sims I have nothing to do and get bored with it, but I could appreciate them if they had PvE instances.

You know, I used to think that too, but in practice, PvE (at least the ones I've experienced in SL) are dreadfully dull and pointless. I've been on two sims that used it extensively (almost exclusively to PvP) and both times it was incredibly predictable, pointless, and occurred in a vacuum, didn't affect anything that came before or after it, so it was a little like sticking an unwanted mini-game in. It's pretty much ruined me for PvE stuff in SL. >.<

The idea is to pull roleplay away from player-conflict and into PvE character-developing scenarios.

Situation A : Can be summarised as a person rolling dice, roleplays /me attacks the goblin. Rolls dice, /me attacks the goblin. Repeat, repeat, really boring. Which I guess is what you've experienced. The focus is combat and emoting is secondary.

Situation B : Is focusing on the roleplay with some combat thrown in. Just like MMO instancing this sim has multiple quests to choose from, which you can discover through roleplaying in the city. i.e. you hear a village is under siege by goblins, so you gather a party of four, walk out to the portal, which rezzes this instance for you up in the sky. It's exclusively yours for a few hours.

You arrive into this scene of a devastated village, dying and impaled peasants everywhere and the stench of necromancy in the air. Does your party start looting houses, do you have a cleric to cleanse the area, will you spend resources on healing the dying, or end their suffering. Do you chase after the necromancer and his loot, or stay to defend the surviving peasants from reanimated corpses. It's the situation your party enters into, these are the decisions you're facing, you party will roleplay it, debate it, stage by stage, you cast your votes and affect the direction of events. Each decision affects your alignments so you want to quest with those of similar morals, else you enter as a Good character, and could exit on the Evil side, thanks to two crazed barbarians in your party who continually favoured material gain and swung the votes!

So your character comes out feeling miserable, they watched dozens dying whilst your group ran around profiting from the carnage and you were a party to it! Alternatively, it went your way and saved some peasants, gained some loot, unlocked new abilities and gained an ally in the Paladin who consistently had your back(There's someone you will quest with again! But the creeper gnome? no ty). It was a good night of adventuring and roleplay, you stood your moral ground, intense emotes were exchanged and you've unlocked the next quest to the necromancer's crypt too! It's all IC, your character has developed socially, morally, financially and militarily too.

These are elements people pre-define for their characters from Day 1, starting out as already wealthy, veterans, stoutly moral and stick with the friends they already knew from other genres. Their character has never made any difficult decisions, they've roleplayed nothing to reach the status they're trying to express and almost always are failing to impress.

I don't want to extend this post with SL RP grievances, but I will say most people are RP-consumers, like 80% of a sim's population contribute nothing, but react to the roleplay of others. Very few are legitimate RP-instigators. The challenge on sim admins is introducing fresh content frequently enough to keep the population engaged. When there's nothing happening, people resort to what they know best : Isolating themselves indoors to roleplay relationships, marriages and family dramas.

Not gonna lie- I've never seen an SL RP sim put that much effort into single PvE scenes. Do you know of any that do? I'd be curious to see it in action. My RP roots are in tabletop RPG's so I'm well aware of how intense and engrossing they can be, but I'm just sayin, I've never seen it carry over into SL very well myself. And I guess I understand why- the work of keeping a sim running 24/7 and the vagueness of most peoples' RP seem to make putting in that much effort somewhat difficult. Plus, it's hard to please everyone, we're all here for different types of RP and one person's "thrilling adventure" is another person's "boring slog", so it can be hard to find a medium to get a player base interested and excited.

On one sim I played on, the Faction Lead was all about PvE, and even went so far as to try to make it so that we had visuals to play off of. We actually physically drove to the designated area, where she had set up the NPC's so that we could use movement ranges and weapons attack ranges and I could appreciate the work and the time she had put in on setting it up but it got dull quick because it was ultimately just "movement/attack post" then wait a half hour for the rest of the people to make their movement attack posts, with the event ending up taking so long I had to duck out and leave after 4 hours and all we'd done is find the spot, move up closer, and shoot a couple of scouts.

Another PvE event I went to, just to contrast- was out of the blue and quick and dirty. It was a Halloween event, we had a zombie clown filled with spiders attacking NPC's in the slums, with the storyteller in a zombie clown avatar and a few spiders rezzed out. My character just happened to stumble upon it literally right after TP'ing into the sim so I ran with it. People kept the posts quick and concise, we got to use some of our special skills to kill the pony sized spiders and then the clown- it was icky and gross and fun and over within a couple of hours.

Of the two types of PvE, I had way more fun with the second one than the first. That said, I'd still take PvP over PvE any day because I like the intensity, the uncertainty, the risks involved in PvP but then again, I've never experienced anything close to what you described in SL RP, so if I ever do, that might change my mind.

"...to take truth for granted is not to know it. Truth not won is not possessed. We are not entitled to truths for which we have not fought." --- (Marauders of Gor, p.7)http://clockworkkitteh.blogspot.com/

Had a PvE event recently, it was fun. Cleared out a smuggler's den with the help of a few knights (other players). It had potential risk too and I told myself that i'd end my character if we ended up losing the battle, but we very harely won. It was done through RP dice and RP between players while an admin played the NPCs and the story. It started some storylines and RP opportunities between players that otherwise never would've happened.

Not everyone is as eager about those things though, you'd be surprised how terrified people are of taking any risks at all in RP. The mere idea there might be a 0,2% chance their character might end up taking a fatal blow due to dice roll rules is enough to keep some people from not even wanting to try engage in any combat at all.

But not nearly as surprised as you'll be at in how many different ways people can twist words claiming a PvE event is somehow an admin agenda, admin favoritism or something that doesn't follow the established lore. Never underestimate people's ability to complain or see conspiracy theories behind everything that affects their RP.

I knew some of the medieval sims used to have PvE interactions. There used to be a sim (Edge of Ro), where I used to roleplay, they used to have weekly quests and bi-weekly boss fights. And it was a roleplay event that allowed a group of roleplayers to roleplay together. The outcome of the roleplay fights and quests were determined by RP dice. It used to be a lot of fun! Things changed, times changed. Now, they are operating under a different name, called Ruins of Xenark, I am not sure whether they still have those quests and boss fights. Probably I should make time to go check them out.